Ways to Free Your Mind You're Feeling Stuck

    Have you ever like you were racing around in without making much forward progress? If you're stuck and you don't know how to rise, don't look outside yourself. Look below.{#blank#}1{#/blank#}

    Go back to what's important

    When we get stuck, it can be extremely useful to come back to these three things: core values, beliefs and goals. Why?{#blank#}2{#/blank#}

    Ask for help

    Very often, highly happy and successful people have a supporting group of friends, family and others who help them{#blank#}3{#/blank#}And don't be afraid to reach out and help someone who's even more stuck than you.

    Embrace the natural pathways

    When you get stuck, there's no need to go back to the drawing board. Ask the people around you about the systems that are working for them, read insightful books and blog articles, and use the same methods and pathways that others have used to get unstuck.{#blank#}4{#/blank#}

    Relocate yourself to an inspiring environment

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#}You can go for a walk in a nearby park. You can come out of the office for a cup of coffee. Or if you are at home, you can simply go to a different room in the house. Whether it's urban spaces, parks, libraries, museums or even our own backyards, there are plenty of available sources that we can draw inspiration and strength from.

A. Goals are the outcomes in life that we strive for.

B. Here are some useful ways to help yourself get unstuck.

C. When you are stuck, don't be afraid to ask for help.

D. One way to get unstuck is to simply change your environment.

E. Because they form the basics of what is important to us as individuals.

F. Break the circle of worry and work on something else.

G. In fact, the system is nothing more than a natural pathway of thought that someone has created with their mind.

    One advantage of the Internet is shopping conveniently online for clothes; one disadvantage of the Internet is also shopping conveniently online for clothes.

    "Nothing fits," said Lam Yuk Wong, a senior in electrical and computer engineering at Rice University. "Everyone says this. They order clothes and they don't fit. People get very unhappy."

    Wong and her design partner, Xuaner "Cecilia" Zhang, are Team White Mirror, creators of what they call a "virtual (虚拟)fitting room". Their goal is simple and consumer-friendly: to let online clothing shoppers have a perfect fit and a perfect look when shopping every time. Both women are from China, Wong from Hong Kong and Zhang from Beijing. They both order most of their clothing online. They got the idea from their own experience as consumers and from listening to the complaints of friends and relatives. "They say, 'The color is wrong' or 'I got the right size but it still does not fit.' We want to make it like you're in the store trying on the clothes," Zhang said.

    Using a Kinect developed by Microsoft for use with its Xbox 360 video game player, Zhang scans Wong and turns her image into, in effect, a virtual model, keeping Wong's dimensions (尺寸), and even her skin and hair color. "We put the clothes on the shopper's 3-D body models and show how they look when they are dressed," Wong said. So far, Wong and Zhang have adapted the software to show dresses and shirts, and they are now working on shorts.

    Asked if she thought men as well as women might be interested in using their virtual fitting room, Wong said, "I think their wives will care about this, so it will also be important to men."

    Your next car could have two seats, three wheels two in front and one in the back and a top speed of more than 100 miles per hour. Elio Motors plans to make such a tiny car named the Elio. Its two seats sit front and back instead of side by side. The driver is positioned in (he center with the passenger directly behind.

    The starting price for the car is just ＄6.800. It has only one door, on the left side, which cuts a few hundred dollars off the manufacturing costs. Having three wheels also makes it cheaper. It has air conditioning, power windows and door locks and an AM/FM radio. More features can be ordered through Elio's long list of suppliers. Elio will also sell the cars directly through its own stores and not through franchised dealers (特约经销商).

    Paul Elio dreamed as a kid that he would one day own a car company called Elio Motora. In 2008, tired of high gas prices, he started working on a car that burns gas in a more effective way. Equally important to him was creating US manufacturing jobs and making the car inexpensive enough to attract buyers who might otherwise be stuck in their old, unreliable cars. "Whatever matters to you, this can move the needle on," he said.

    Already, more than 27,000 people have reserved one. Paul hopes to make 250,000 cars a year by 2020. So far, reservation holders are those who will use the Elio as a second or third car for work. Paul Elio believes the car will interest college students as well as used-car drivers who want something newer and more reliable, though.

    Large gatherings such as weddings and conferences can be socially stressful. Pressure to learn people's names only adds to the stress. A new facial-recognition app could come to the rescue, but privacy experts recommend going on with caution.

    The app, called SocialRecall, connects names with faces via smartphone cameras and facial recognition, potentially avoiding the need for formal introductions. "It breaks down these social barriers we all have when meeting somebody," says Barry Sandrew, who created the app and tested it at an event attended by about 1,000 people.

    After receiving an invitation to download SocialRecall from an event organizer, the user is asked to take two selfies and sign in via social media. At the event, the app is active within a previously defined geographical area. When a user points his or her phone camera at an attendee's face, the app identifies the individual displays the person's name, and links to his or her social media profile. To protect privacy, it recognizes only those who have agreed to participate. And the app's creators say it automatically deletes users' data after an event.

    Ann Cavoukian, a privacy expert who runs the Privacy by Design Center of Excellence praises the app's creators for these protective measures. She cautions, however, that when people choose to share their personal information with the app they should know that there may be unintended consequences down the road with that information being used in another context that might come back to bite you."

    The start-up has also developed a version of the app for individuals who suffer from prosopagnosia, or "face blindness", a condition that prevents people from recognizing individuals they have met. To use this app a person first acquires an image of someone's face, from either the smartphone's camera or a photograph, and then tags it with a name. When the camera spots that same face in real life, the previously entered information is displayed. The collected data are stored only on a user's phone, according to the team behind the app.

    Many studies have hinted(暗示) that alcohol, in moderation, can do a heart good. But new research suggests that moderate drinkers are no more likely than non­drinkers to have clear arteries(动脉).

    The scientists looked at almost 2,000 patients who underwent CT test. Overall, there was no association between people's drinking habits and their heart diseases. Researchers said an advantage of the new study is that it used objective measurements.

    “No prior studies have assessed the relationship between alcohol consumption and the presence of heart disease,” said lead researcher Dr Julia Karady. "We could not find any relation between the presence of heart disease and alcohol consumption," Karady said. At the same time, she added, there was no evidence that heavier drinking raised the risk of heart disease.

    However, groups like the American Heart Association(AHA) warn against excessive drinking, because it can raise blood pressure and contribute to heart failure and other problems.

    In general, "moderate" is defined as no more than one glass of alcohol a day for women, and no more than two a day for men. But those studies do not prove that alcohol, itself, protects the heart—in large part because alcohol also carries risks.

A group of small, waggling (扭动) robots that communicate by flashing lights can make collective decisions. This is similar to the process bees use to reach an agreement on where to build their nest.

"We believe that in the near future there are going to be simple robots that will do jobs that we don't want to do, and it will be very important that they make decisions on their own," says Carmen Miguel at the University of Barcelona in Spain. She and her team tested how copying bees might help with that.

When bees go house-hunting, they communicate their preferred locations through a "waggle dance". The more a bee recommends one location, the longer and harder it waggles. Eventually other bees join them, and they reach an agreement when a majority are waggling together. Researchers previously translated this behavior into a mathematical model, and Miguel and her colleagues used it to program decision-making rules into small robots called kilobots.

Each kilobot with three thin legs had an infrared-light emitter (红外线发射器) and receiver, and a colored LED light. Within a group, kilobots could move around, turn clockwise or anticlockwise and use infrared signals to exchange information.

Ezequiel Ferrero at the University of Barcelona says that across all the experiments, kilobots reached an agreement within about half an hour, even when they didn't have many immediate neighbors to communicate with. He says that getting the right combination of how long they spend transmitting their message and how much they walk around allowed them to make a collective decision in the end.